The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel

by Sean Cummings

  “Sparks would frown on all this hardware,” I said, closing the locker. “Until we need it.”

  “Mister R?” Charlotte called out. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here kid,” I said, padding across the bunker. “There’s some cereal in the kitchen. I don’t have any juice, but I’ve got lots of instant coffee.”

  She screwed up her face into a knot and shook her head. “I guess I’ll just have some cereal.”

  Charlotte crawled out of her sleeping bag and followed me to the small table where I’d laid out a bowl of Cheerios and a cup of cold skim milk alongside a plastic spoon. She took a seat and poured the skim milk on the cereal. I grabbed the box of cereal and poured a healthy portion into my bowl and took a seat across from her.

  “How are you holding up, kid?” I asked.

  She poked at her cereal with a plastic spoon and shovelled some into her mouth. “I miss Mommy,” she said with a sniffle.

  “I know. None of this is easy, Charlotte. I’m surprised you can even talk right now after what you’ve been through.”

  She looked up from her bowl. “I have foreseen what you will ask of me, and I cannot speak of it, death-dealer.”

  I finished the rest of my cereal before deciding to tackle the fact that Charlotte’s guidance counsellor passenger had referred to me as ‘death-dealer.’ What the hell was living inside the girl? I studied her face as she continued poking away at her breakfast. She looked like any other eight-year-old. There wasn’t a quirky glint in her eyes when she spoke in her guidance counsellor voice. She looked quite normal.

  But there was nothing normal about Charlotte Simms, and I aimed to find out the truth of her because I needed to know what I was dealing with if I was going to protect her from hellions, demons and every other asshole from the dark place who would be coming after her.

  She finished her cereal and pushed the bowl aside. “You have questions,” she said in an entirely business-like tone. “You care to know if there are two of us in here.”

  “You called me death-dealer,” I said, matching her tone. “That means that you know what I am.”

  Charlotte tapped her right temple with an index finger. “The human mind is an amazing creation. So little of it gets used, and much of that winds up bombarded by drugs, alcohol, Facebook, and reality television.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like an old man with pants up to his armpits who complains about big government, kid. Are you Charlotte or is there someone else inside there?”

  “I cannot speak truths with you, death-dealer because the time is not yet right,” she remarked. “But I am the girl you see before you. That much I will offer. When the time is right, you will learn more about me and what will happen.”

  What will happen? Okay, for the record, I hate it when I get slammed with a cryptic warning of some calamity that is about to happen. Naturally, I just had to press the girl to find out what the hell she was talking about.

  I raised a finger. “You know what I am and that implies you know the truth of things. Does the little girl version of you see me for what I am or is it just you?”

  “She sees because I see. I am Charlotte Simms, death-dealer. Do you understand?”

  I shook my head. “Nope, but I’m trying to.”

  Charlotte got up from her chair and started searching around the small kitchen area. “Um, do you have some chalk or a marker or something, Mister R?” she asked, using her eight-year-old voice.

  I slid my chair back and walked over to a large plastic tub on the floor in the corner. I pulled off the lid and rooted around through bundles of old bills, correspondence, and skin magazines until I found an old plaid pencil case. I tossed it to the girl and said, “Here you go. Keep it. There are markers and pens and coloured pencils in there. What are you going to do?”

  Charlotte clutched the pencil case tightly in her right hand and strolled out of the kitchen area with a look of purpose in her eyes. She walked right over to the wall that still contained tiny droplets of Amy Curtis’ blood and folded her arms in front of her chest. She cast her gaze down at the blood and the up to the ceiling.

  “This wall is a lot higher than in my old bedroom,” she said, unzipping her pencil case. She rifled through its contents until she found what she was looking for; a Sharpie chisel tip. “Is it okay if I draw on your wall, Mister R?”

  I deliberately kept my eyes focused on the area of the wall above Amy’s blood. I was just about to tell the girl that I could probably find her some paper to draw on when she pulled off the cap of her marker and then drew a large circle over the area of the wall with the droplets of blood.

  “Help yourself then,” I said, a bit surprised that Charlotte hadn’t given me time to formulate an answer.

  “You want a cigarette,” she said walking back to the kitchen area. She returned a few seconds later with the chair she’d been sitting on to eat her cereal.

  “I’d love a ciggy butt,” I said wistfully as I padded a hand against my shirt and then realizing I’d left them inside my trench coat. “But you already lectured me on the dangers of second-hand smoke. Plus, I said I would protect you. I need to be with you at all times.”

  Charlotte climbed up on the chair and drew a mathematical symbol on the left-hand side of the wall. “We are quite safe here, death-dealer. However, I must complete this formation to learn just how long we will be safe in this place.”

  “Wait … what?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Go outside of this bunker as you call it, and enjoy your morning cigarette. Perhaps brew a cup of instant coffee. I know that most smokers love the combination of tobacco and caffeine. Certainly, my late mother did. We can discuss further in a few moments. I don’t care to be distracted.”

  “Uh … you sure it’s safe?”

  “Completely,” she responded as she busily scribbled symbols and formula on the wall.

  “At some point, you’re going to explain why you’re writing graffiti on the wall of my bunker then?”

  “When I’m finished.”

  I shrugged and grabbed a pack of cigarettes out of my trench coat. The girl seemed focused on her task and if leaving her alone to write on the wall was going to be a lead-in to a discussion about why she felt compelled to write precision formulas, then I’d leave her be. I closed the blast door behind me and strolled up the tunnel to the entrance. I waited until I was well clear of the bunker to light my cigarette. As I leaned against the grill of my Jeep Wagoneer, a thought occurred to me: maybe the complicated mathematical formula was some message from up on high.

  Maybe one of His people were using Charlotte as a backdoor contact with yours truly. She did, after all, scribble my name hundreds of times on her wall in the house on Victoria Road. Somehow, I was central to whatever was going to happen next, but I didn’t have a clue where any of this was going. All that I knew was that the girl’s mother had been murdered by a boyfriend who made the mistake of skin-on-skin contact with Charlotte. The girl made him disappear into thin air. A demonically possessed social worker killed three cops and tried to kill Charlotte, and a truckload of demons wanted to skewer her back on the highway.

  If she were on Hell’s hit list, maybe I’d need to capture the next demonic arsehole alive and question him to learn the truth. I made a mental note to do just that.

  I took a deep haul on my cigarette and exhaled smoke through my nostrils as I contemplated how I could somehow fortify the bunker against divine threats. Demons weren’t as powerful as angels, and they could be kept at bay through a variety of measures like magical protective wards (which I knew diddly squat about), holy relics (of which I had none) and magical circles. It was a defensible position, but at the end of the day, all the best arcane protection wouldn’t stop the bad guys from coming because the last time I looked, Hell had an unlimited supply of demons, hellions, and creatures too terrifying to even contemplate.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Sparks saying that she’d just left. I reckon
ed it would take at least an hour and a half for her to arrive. With my cigarette dangling from my lips, I climbed to the top of Das Bunker and gazed out at the Atlantic. A chill breeze blew off the bay, and I shivered as the wind’s icy fingers caressed my face. A moment later the hatch to the firing bay below opened and up climbed Charlotte. She stood beside me and reached for my hand. I pulled away at the last second when I noticed she was wearing a worn pair of leather gloves.

  “I found the gloves in a box of junk,” she said in her eight-year-old voice. “They were on top of a bunch of magazines with naked ladies. Why do you have magazines with naked ladies? That’s weird.”

  With no skin-on-skin contact, it was safe to hold the girl’s hand, and I assumed she reached for mine because she needed comforting since her mother had been murdered before her very eyes only a few hours ago. Or maybe she was trying to comfort me. I took a deep breath of the cool ocean air and took her hand in mine.

  “The magazines are art books, kid,” I said after a short moment. “I’m very much an artsy kind of guy. My secret is out.”

  “Why do you want to look at pictures of naked ladies anyway?” she asked in a voice so earnest that I immediately felt ashamed of myself.

  “It’s … uh … a grown-up thing that men sometimes do.” I said suddenly feeling like a dirty old man.

  “Want to know something?”

  “What’s that?” I said, wishing the conversation would end or for a large asteroid to hit me.

  “All those naked ladies used to be little girls like me.”

  She left that statement hanging there, and I didn’t know if it was purposeful to make me consider the reasons why I bought skin magazines. Given that I’m not entirely human, the objectification of women wasn’t exactly something I considered. Ever. I would often buy a porn magazine when purchasing a pack of smokes at the convenience store. A thoughtless mechanical act. I’d done it hundreds of times over the years.

  “I don’t really know what to say to that, kid,” I muttered, hoping the conversation would go away.

  “Well I don’t like those books,” the little girl chided.

  Okay, so I hadn’t considered that every woman in those magazines had their individual story. Amy Curtis got into the sex trade to fuel her habit. I don’t think she ever enjoyed what she was doing and it was after I’d taken some time to get to know her that I learned there was a reason she turned to the sex trade. I learned that she was a human being with hopes and fears. I fell in love with her. I would never have fallen in love had I simply left her to her fate in Emil Vachon’s pimpmobile.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said after a few moments of silence.

  “Do you?” asked Charlotte.

  “I’m trying to, but—”

  She squeezed my hand through her leather glove. “But you’re different like me,” Charlotte said. “You are an old spirit.”

  I glanced down at the girl through the corner of my eye. “I prefer the term ‘visitor’. A very old visitor.”

  She looked up at me and smiled warmly. No easy feat, given that she’d lost her mother only a few hours earlier.

  “We’re both visitors here, Mister R,” she said, giving my hand another squeeze. “Everyone is just a visitor, and then they’re gone.”

  I grunted. “You going to tell me what you are, kid?”

  She took a deep breath and gazed out onto the ocean. “I’m just different, is all. I can see things. I can see what is coming in front of us. I can see what everything means. It hurts my head if I don’t write what I see but it’s all so big. Everything I see is so big, and only I can see it.”

  “Can you see the next winning ticket in the Mucho Millions Lottery?”

  “I’ve never tried.”

  “That’s okay, kiddo,” I said squeezing her hand myself. “You know what I am. You know that I am a death-dealer. We just have to figure out what you are and then maybe you can find your place in this world. It’s not going to be easy—what happened to your mother was an accident, you know that, right?”

  “I caused it,” she said, her voice starting to shake. “I made Mommy die when her boyfriend touched me.”

  I nodded. “I caused someone’s death too, Charlotte. Someone I loved very much. I didn’t know what love was before Amy.”

  “Does this mean we are bad people, Mister R? We caused other people to die.”

  I exhaled heavily. “No, I don’t think we are bad people, Charlotte. I think we are just making it up as we go. You going to show me what you wrote on the wall in the bunker now?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I’ll tell you what it means. Oh … and Mister R?”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “You will see Amy again. Soon.”

  6

  Complex geometric shapes combined with ancient symbols crawled up the concrete wall. Charlotte had even drawn images similar to hieroglyphs that I’d seen on the walls of the temples in ancient Egypt; only the images appeared as parts of whatever complicated equation she’d managed to scribble out. (Yes, ancient Egypt. I was there. Whatever.) I stepped back to take it all in.

  “Okay, here’s what I want to know.”

  “What’s that?” asked Charlotte.

  “Why can’t you write all this stuff in a notebook or something?”

  “I need a big space to work. A universe is a big place, Mister R,” Charlotte said, taking a few steps up to the wall.

  “Do you read it from left to right or right to left or from top to bottom?” I asked as I scratched my chin.

  She shook her head and pointed to the middle of the wall and placed an index finger on the shape of a circle with a pair of jagged lines that intersected inside the ring. “It’s not like a book. This here is the starting point, and the two lines are us. They meet in the middle – that’s last night when you came to my house. The jagged lines extend to the inner edge of the circle.”

  I blinked. “I have no idea what that means, kid.”

  She threw me a shrug. “I know. The circle is the protection offered by this place. On the left side of the wall, you can see there is the bad language.”

  I scanned the left side of the wall and noticed there were indeed numerous symbols written in demonic script, and I shuddered for a moment as I cast my gaze back down onto Charlotte. “Unreal. You’re scribbling the language that hellspawn has used since the Old Times. No human is supposed to know about this stuff!”

  I looked up on the right side of the wall and noticed several symbols which I knew immediately to be an angelic script. A spiral in between four small triangles had been scrawled next to a pair of diamond shapes complete with the outline of an eye in the middle of both.

  “That’s angelic language,” I said after a moment. “You’ve got the language of the dark place on one side of the wall and the language of angels on the other. And what’s all this other stuff? It looks like a mathematical formula.”

  “It’s what might happen—sheesh, you should know this stuff,” she said, almost sounding impatient with me. “The word might is all about chance. Like when you look out the window and you see dark clouds in the sky. And you say, it looks like it might rain.”

  I exhaled in frustration. “I have zero clues about what the hell any of this means, kid.”

  She looked around the bunker and grimaced as she cast her eyes on Amy’s blood. “She meant a lot to you. This place did not offer her protection from dark forces, death-dealer. There is nothing you could have done to stop her from being taken because that was to be her place. Everyone has their place, for good or evil, short term or long term. Everything is laid out for all to choose their own path. I can see those paths. Nobody else can see them but me. Do you understand?”

  I leaned against the wall and pulled out a cigarette. I lit it with a flick of my Zippo knowing the girl disapproved but I didn’t care. “You’re saying it’s all about choices. Is there some celestial factory that churns out choices for everybody? I can’t even fathom how the hell that works.”

/>   The girl nodded and pointed to a large symbol of a spiral near the image of the diamonds. “It works because all humanity is connected. Every thought that comes into a human mind. Every notion or desire. These create choices for people to make. Should I cheat on my husband? Should I eat that fatty doughnut? Should I lie on my taxes? Should I donate five hundred dollars to a charity? And each choice impacts human beings because of the seven deadly sins.”

  I arched my eyebrows and raised a hand. “Wait a minute. Are you saying the seven deadly sins anchor free will? Lust, gluttony, envy, pride, sloth, wrath and greed? You make it sound like all of humanity are pawns on a chessboard.”

  She nodded and turned back to face her mural of scribblings. “Who says they aren’t?”

  “Come one, kid. Spill the beans and tell me who you are?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not time yet. Everything that has happened was supposed to happen. That’s what you need to know, Mister R,”

  And with that non-answer, my phone buzzed in my pocket. “Yeah, Sparks,” I said quickly as I scoured the mural the girl had drawn to try and understand the kid’s mind.

  “I’m about ten minutes from the turn-off,” said Sparks. In the background, I could make out the sound of her police radio.

  “Please tell me you brought some coffee.”

  I could almost hear Sparks’ teeth grating together. “Of course, and I got a bag full of breakfast sandwiches for your dining pleasure!”

  “Seriously?”

  “I figured the girl would be hungry. Anyway, nobody has followed me from what I can tell. We need to plan out what to do next because there is an Amber Alert for the little girl now. If we get caught with her, we’re going down big time.”

  “Meh … jail is nothing compared to arcane batshit crazy insanity. Don’t worry. I get the feeling that Charlotte’s time under my protection isn’t going to be forever.”